How to Evaluate Brand Tracking Companies and Approaches

The best way to evaluate brand tracking companies is to match their approach, expertise and pricing to the decisions your organisation needs the tracker to support. That means understanding what a good tracker measures, how it should be designed, the types of tracking study available, and the trade-offs between software platforms and full-service agencies. This guide covers each in turn, so you can commission with confidence.

Brand tracking is a way to invest in your brand

Your brand is one of your biggest assets. The most effective brands, the ones we all love the most, deliver real benefits for organisations such as customer loyalty and business growth. So, it makes sense to invest in your brand – and because we can't manage what we can't measure, one of the key investments must be in brand tracking. And because the value of a tracker compounds over years, choosing the right brand tracking company or approach at the outset is one of the most consequential research decisions you will make.

If you are new to the subject, start with our full introduction to what brand tracking is and how to use it. This guide assumes you know the basics and focuses on evaluation and commissioning.

What should a brand tracking company measure? The elements of brand equity

Any provider you evaluate should be able to explain how they will measure brand equity, which is a composite measure of the value of your brand, which shows likely brand performance. Brand equity is the sum of the following elements:

Brand awareness and mental availability: Awareness refers to the extent to which consumers are familiar with and recognise a brand. Mental availability references the extent to which it readily comes to mind at time of need or at purchase. You want both to be high so that when the consumer is (for example) looking at a supermarket shelf full of competing yoghurt, cereal or hair dye brands, your yoghurt, cereal or hair dye is the one that they recognise and pick up.

Brand loyalty: The extent to which consumers consistently choose your brand over others. This matters for the cost of acquiring and retaining customers, and it matters just as much for the ongoing relationship – loyal customers are more likely to forgive the occasional customer service failure, for example. They are also more likely to spread positive word of mouth about your brand.

Brand image: How do consumers perceive your brand and its associated attributes, such as quality, reliability and uniqueness? What comes to mind when they think of your brand and does that image reflect the one that your organisation has worked hard to create?

Brand associations: This refers to the emotional or psychological associations that consumers have with your brand, such as (hopefully) feelings of trust, reliability or nostalgia. Trust is really important: research shows that 75% of people with high brand trust say they will buy the brand's product even if it isn't the cheapest, it is the only brand of the product they'll buy, and they are far more likely to check out a new product from that brand to purchase.

Brand value: This is the sum of perceived benefits and corresponding value that consumers attribute to your brand, based on the extent to which they feel it meets or even exceeds their needs and expectations. Perceived brand value can have a significant influence on purchasing decisions.

Brand experience: How do consumers interact with your brand? How often do they use it, when and where? Which are the key touchpoints and how positive is the nature of the brand experience that is delivered?

Need states: This refers to the suitability of your brand in relation to the consumers' main need states – so the individual, physical and emotional needs your product or service must be capable of meeting. Going back to yoghurt, for example, some consumers may need a low fat healthy probiotic yoghurt to fulfil their need for physical fitness and wellbeing, whereas others may need a tasty treat with chocolate pieces to fulfil their need for indulgence that is still perceived as healthy.

Your brand tracking study may report on some, or all, of these measures individually, as well as providing an overall brand equity score. It's important to track these measures over time, as well as tracking sales, so you can see which initiatives have been effective and how to improve your marketing.

What is the difference between brand tracking and a brand tracker?

Brand tracking is the process and a brand tracker is the vehicle, most often a quantitative online market research survey, that is used to conduct the brand tracking process. Typically, market research agencies that specialise in brand tracking will offer brand trackers as products. In many cases, these will be standardised 'black box' approaches. At Brandspeak, though, we believe in a more flexible approach to brand tracking.

What is the difference between brand tracking and a brand audit?

A brand audit is a one-off, in-depth review of a brand's current position: its identity, perceptions, competitive standing and consistency across touchpoints. Brand tracking is the continuous measurement that follows, showing how that position changes over time. The two are complementary rather than alternatives: an audit establishes the baseline and diagnoses the starting position, while tracking tells you whether the actions you take are working. If a provider offers only audits, you get a snapshot. If they offer only tracking with no diagnostic depth, you may measure movement without understanding it. The strongest programmes combine both.

What should a good brand tracking programme deliver?

Brand tracking should be seen as an investment which enables you to improve your product or service to better reflect your target audience's needs, expectations and behaviours. When evaluating brand tracking companies, ask how their programme will help you do each of the following:

• Measure performance: you need to understand what is happening with your brand in the market and over time – things change and tracking can help you get ahead of the curve.
• Prioritise customer segments: brand tracking can be used to understand the preferences and behaviours of different customer segments. If you have an existing segmentation, you can apply this to your brand tracker to identify segments that show strong affinity, loyalty or growth potential.
• Evaluate marketing: you can test hypotheses and validate assumptions about your marketing strategies by monitoring brand metrics before and after implementing a specific strategy, and seeing if the impact aligns with your expectations.
• Generate ideas: brand tracking enables you to keep an eye on how the market is shifting, including consumer preferences, emerging trends and competitor moves.
• Compare with competitors: by tracking key metrics for your brand as well as competitors' brands, you can identify areas where you outperform or lag behind the competition.
• Evaluate the impact of marketing communications: brand trackers can help evaluate comms by measuring brand metrics before and after campaigns and by measuring message resonance, recall and relevance.

Which brand tracking methods should companies offer?

These days, the majority of brand tracking is conducted via online survey, which is the fastest and most cost-effective way of gathering data. However, surveys aren't the only way to gain insight about your brand. There is scope to enhance your survey with data from additional sources such as social media, online search data, share of voice and share of spend data, internal sales data and CRM analysis and qualitative research. When you bring together these disparate data sets, it helps you get a more holistic picture of what is happening with your brand. A provider that can only run the survey, with no capability to integrate other data sources or add qualitative depth, will limit what your tracker can tell you as your needs grow.

Which metrics should your brand tracker include?

A brand tracking survey should contain the following key metrics:

• Spontaneous brand awareness
• Prompted brand awareness
• Brand imagery associations
• Brand personality associations
• Product/service quality ratings
• Brand preference
• Brand purchase including frequency
• Future purchase intent
• Brand usage occasions
• Brand need states fit
• Brand closeness – emotional connection
• Net promoter score (NPS)

In addition to the above, a tracker can also be used to evaluate the impact of a recent marketing campaign. For example, brand awareness, associations and purchase intent scores can be compared before and after the campaign has run, to determine uplift in those areas. We've written in more depth about brand tracking metrics here.

How should a brand tracking company design your tracker?

A capable provider should walk you through seven design steps, and how they handle each is a good test of their quality:

1. Include the right target audiences – Your tracker should include not only your current customers, but your competitors' customers too. If appropriate, you should also aim to include a demographic spread that will enable you to identify any age-based differences in relation to your brand.
2. Ensure you have a sample size large enough for statistically sound analysis. There is always a tension between cost and sample size, but choosing too small a sample is a false economy.
3. Determine tracking frequency – Agree on the correct frequency of tracking relative to your brand and sector dynamics. The right answer is the one that works for you and considers the size and stability of your brand and your strategic objectives.
4. Include a 'flexi-section' so that you can respond to special circumstances without disrupting the core questioning. Core questioning should remain stable, wave on wave, so you can compare and see trends over time.
5. Implement ongoing and recurring reporting that enables you to visualise trends. Brand managers often use an interactive, 'always-on' dashboard that shows key metrics at a glance, whilst enabling them to carry out their own data analysis and quickly export the results for internal sharing.
6. Calculate an overall aggregate brand health score drawn from all the key brand health metrics. This sounds simple but in reality can be a complex exercise that needs careful consideration. This will be the key measure you use to track performance, so it's important to get it right.
7. Carry out annual strategic deep dives using the full year's data set. Regardless of how often you conduct your brand tracker, an annual review makes sense as part of your wider marketing strategic review.

What are the five types of brand tracking studies?

Part of evaluating an approach is knowing which type of study you actually need. There are five main types of brand tracking studies to consider:

1. Consumer brand tracking

For brands that sell to consumer audiences. This form of tracking is suitable for any brand involved in the provision of goods or services to the consumer. For example, broadband suppliers, food, clothing retailers, car manufacturers, package holiday providers and retail banks.

2. B2B brand tracking

For brands that supply other brands, rather than consumers. Brand health matters for all brands, meaning that it is just as important that it is measured by organisations that specialise in supplying products and services to other businesses. For example, car leasing companies, facilities management companies and organisations that provide insurance for businesses. B2B brand tracking differs from consumer tracking in practice: audiences are smaller and harder to reach, decision-making units involve multiple stakeholders, and metrics such as trust, credibility and consideration among named competitors carry more weight than mass awareness. Evaluate whether a provider has genuine B2B research experience, not just a consumer tracker with the labels changed.

3. Pure brand tracking

In contrast with brand and comms tracking, pure brand tracking focuses on brand metrics only and doesn't use the survey as a vehicle to explore other areas of insight. A pure brand tracker will therefore focus on core brand metrics only, like brand awareness, brand associations, brand preference and purchase intent.

4. Brand and comms tracking

Unlike pure brand tracking, brand and comms tracking includes elements of the brand that relate to marketing communications, such as ad recall or recognition.

5. Always on brand tracking

As the name suggests, this refers to the ongoing sampling and completion of your brand tracking survey, with the data cut in waves to provide agile and responsive insight when needed.

How should challenger brands approach brand tracking?

Challenger brands need tracking as much as market leaders, but the design priorities differ. For a challenger, the key questions are whether awareness is building among the target audience, whether the brand is entering consideration sets alongside the incumbents and whether its intended points of difference are actually landing. A lean, focused tracker measuring the brand against two or three named incumbents, run at a frequency the budget can sustain, will serve a challenger far better than a scaled-down copy of a market leader's programme. When evaluating providers, ask specifically how they would design for a challenger position rather than adapting a template.

Software platform or agency: how do you choose?

Brand tracking software platforms offer dashboards and standardised questionnaires at lower entry prices, and suit organisations with in-house research expertise and straightforward measurement needs. A full-service agency tracker costs more because it provides more: a bespoke questionnaire designed around your decisions, recruitment matched to your specific audience, senior analytical expertise and commercially grounded recommendations. The question is not which is better in the abstract, but which is right for the decisions you need to make. Our breakdown of brand tracking costs in the UK compares the two models in detail, and GrowthTrack, Brandspeak's advanced tracking programme, is designed to sit between the two poles: agency rigour with a structured, commercially focused approach.

What questions should you ask a brand tracking company?

Beyond the design steps above, a structured conversation with each shortlisted provider will quickly separate the strong from the merely polished. Five questions do most of the work.

Where does your sample come from? Ask how the provider guarantees the same sample source and quality wave on wave. Consistency matters more in tracking than in any other form of research, because a change of panel can move the data more than the market does.

Who designs the questionnaire, and who analyses the results? You are buying senior expertise, so establish how much of it you will actually receive, and who will present the findings at each wave.

How do you handle a break in the trend? Questionnaire changes, panel switches and methodology updates are sometimes unavoidable. A good provider will explain how they bridge old and new data rather than pretending the issue never arises.

Can we access the raw data? Providers confident in their work will say yes. Reluctance is a warning sign, particularly where a 'black box' equity score cannot be interrogated.

What happens if we want to leave? Clarify data ownership and exit terms before you commission. A provider that makes leaving difficult is telling you something about how the relationship will run.

Can you switch brand tracking providers without losing your trend data?

Yes, with care, and the possibility is worth establishing before you commission rather than when you want to move. The trend data should belong to you, and an experienced agency can take on an existing tracker by replicating the core questionnaire and sample specification and running a parallel or bridging wave, so that old and new data can be read together. Some movement at the point of transition is normal. It should be labelled honestly in reporting rather than smoothed away. If a provider cannot describe how they would manage a transition in either direction, treat that as part of your evaluation.

How should your study be reported?

A brand tracker is only useful if it is actionable. The first step to using your tracker to drive change is to ensure that you have easy-to-understand and accessible reporting. There are several ways you can do this:

• Create a brand health scorecard that reports on overall brand health metrics and the brand equity score. The equivalent to an executive summary when only the headlines are needed.
• An online reporting platform for always-on brand trackers. This enables you to monitor brand health in near time including the provision of easy-to-use data interrogation so that you can ask and answer ad-hoc questions quickly and easily.
• A post-wave analysis and presentation that includes a detailed data analysis of the results and answers both core objectives and wave-specific brand questions.
• A strategic, annual deep-dive. An opportunity to look back at the data set over a full year and carry out a much more detailed analysis, usually to answer bigger, more strategic questions and objectives.

How frequently should you carry out brand tracking studies?

For smaller, established brands operating in less volatile sectors, where less-frequent marketing activity is conducted, an annual or bi-annual brand tracking exercise is likely to be sufficient. But for larger organisations and those operating in fast-moving sectors where there is significant competitor activity or price fluctuation, ongoing brand health monitoring becomes necessary so that brand issues can be rapidly identified and acted upon.

How do you measure the ROI of brand building?

Measuring the ROI of brand building can be challenging because brand-building initiatives often have long-term effects that are difficult to attribute solely to specific marketing activities – you could argue that all of your marketing investment is a form of brand building. However, a well-thought-out measure of brand equity represents the intangible value of your brand, including customer perceptions, loyalty and brand associations. Measuring changes in brand equity over time can indicate the effectiveness of brand-building efforts. We have written a dedicated guide to brand tracking ROI and connecting brand health to revenue, which sets out the evidence base and how to build the business case.

Get expert help with your brand tracking

Brandspeak is a market research and brand tracking agency that specialises in B2C and B2B brand tracking. For more information about our services, or to talk through how to evaluate your options, please contact Jeremy Braune, Managing Director, at jeremy@brandspeak.co.uk, or reach us via our contact page.

Frequently asked questions about choosing brand tracking

What do brand tracking companies actually do?

Brand tracking companies design, field and analyse ongoing research programmes that measure a brand's awareness, perceptions, loyalty and purchase intent over time. Full-service agencies also interpret the results, connect them to commercial outcomes and make recommendations, while software platforms primarily provide the survey infrastructure and dashboards for clients to interpret themselves.

What is the difference between brand tracking and a brand audit?

A brand audit is a one-off diagnostic review of a brand's current position, while brand tracking is the continuous measurement of how that position changes over time. An audit establishes the baseline. Tracking shows whether your actions are moving the brand in the right direction. Most organisations benefit from an audit first, followed by an ongoing tracker.

Should you choose brand tracking software or an agency?

Choose software if you have in-house research expertise, straightforward measurement needs and a limited budget. Choose an agency if you need a bespoke design, hard-to-reach audiences, senior analysis or recommendations you can act on. Many organisations start on a platform and move to an agency programme as the decisions riding on the data become larger.

How is B2B brand tracking different from consumer tracking?

B2B brand tracking works with smaller, harder-to-reach audiences, longer buying cycles and multi-stakeholder decision-making units. It places more weight on trust, credibility and consideration among a named competitor set than on mass awareness. A provider should be able to show genuine B2B fieldwork capability, not a consumer tracker with relabelled questions.

Do challenger brands need a different tracking approach?

Yes. Challenger brands should track whether awareness is building in their target audience, whether they are entering consideration sets alongside incumbents and whether their points of difference are landing. A lean tracker measured against two or three named incumbents, at a sustainable frequency, is more useful to a challenger than a scaled-down copy of a market leader's programme.

About the author

Jeremy Braune is Managing Director and Head of Qualitative Research at Brandspeak, a global market research and brand strategy consultancy formed in 2004. A brand strategist with over 30 years' experience, Jeremy leads brand tracking, brand development and positioning programmes for consumer and B2B organisations across sectors including financial services, FMCG, technology and professional services.